The Icebound Land

17

T WO DAYS LATER, W OLFWIND LEFT S KORGHIJL H ARBOR AND turned northeast for Skandia. Slagor and his men remained behind, facing the task of making temporary repairs to their ship, before limping back to their home port. The ship was too badly damaged to continue west for the raiding season. Slagor's decision to leave port early was proving to be a costly one.

The wind, which for weeks had blown out of the north, now shifted to the west, allowing the Skandians to set the big mainsail. Wolfwind surged easily over the gray sea, her wake stretching behind her. The motion was exhilarating and liberating as the kilometers reeled off under her keel and the spirits of the crew lifted as they came closer to their homeland.

Only Will and Evanlyn failed to share in the general lightening of mood. Skorghijl had been a miserable place, barren and unfriendly. But at least the months there had postponed the time when they might be separated. They knew they were to be sold as slaves in Hallasholm and there was every chance they would go to different masters.

Will had tried once to cheer Evanlyn about their possible separation.

"They say Hallasholm isn't a big place," he said, "so even if we are split up, we may still be able to see each other. After all, they can't expect us to work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week."

Evanlyn hadn't replied. Her experience of Skandians so far told her that was exactly what they would expect.

Erak noticed their silence and the melancholy mood that had settled upon them and felt a twinge of sympathy. He wondered if there was some way he could make sure they stayed together.

Of course, he could always keep them as slaves himself, he reasoned. But he had no real need for personal slaves. As a war leader of the Skandians, he lived in the officers' barracks, where his needs were tended by orderlies. If he kept the two Araluens as his own, he'd have to pay to feed and clothe them. And he'd have to be responsible for them as well. He discarded the idea with an irritated shake of his head.

"To hell with them," he muttered fiercely, driving them from his mind and concentrating on keeping the ship perfectly on course, frowning fiercely as he watched the pole stone needle floating in its gimballed bowl by the steering blade.

On the twelfth day of the crossing, they made a landfall with the Skandian coast-exactly where Erak had predicted they would fetch up.

From the admiring glances the men cast at the Jarl, Will could tell that this was a considerable feat.

Throughout the following days, they edged closer to the shore, until Will and Evanlyn could make out more detail. High cliffs and snow-covered mountains seemed to be the dominant features of Skandia.

"He's caught Loka's current perfectly," Svengal told them as he prepared to climb to the lookout position on the mast's crosstrees.

The cheerful second in command had developed a certain fondness for Will and Evanlyn. He knew their lives would be hard and pitiless as slaves, and he tried to compensate with a few friendly words whenever possible. Unfortunately, his next comment, meant in a kindly fashion, was little comfort to either Will or Evanlyn.

"Ah well," he said, seizing hold of a halyard to haul himself to the top of the mast, "we should reach home in two or three hours."

As it turned out, he was mistaken. The wolfship, finally under oars again, ghosted through the thick fog that shrouded the Hallasholm harbor mouth barely an hour and a quarter later. Will and Evanlyn stood silently in the waist of the ship as the town of Hallasholm loomed out of the fog.

It was not a large place. Nestled at the foot of towering pine-clad mountains, Hallasholm consisted of perhaps fifty buildings-all of them single story and all, apparently, built from pine logs and roofed with a mixture of thatch and turf.

The buildings huddled around the edge of the harbor, where a dozen or more wolfships were moored at jetties or drawn up on the land, canted on their sides as men worked on the hulls, fighting a never-ending battle against the attacks of the marine parasites that constantly ate away at the wooden planks. Smoke curled up from most of the chimneys and the cold air was redolent of the heady smell of burning pine logs.

The principal building, Ragnak's Great Hall, was built from the same logs as the rest of the houses in the town. But it was larger, longer and wider, and with a pitched roof that let it tower above its neighbors. It stood in the center of the town, dominating the scene, surrounded by a dry ditch and a stockade-more pine logs, Will noticed.

Pine was obviously the most common building material available in Skandia. A long, wide road led up to the gateway in the stockade from the main quay.

Gazing at the town across the glass-smooth water of the harbor, Will thought that, in another time and under other conditions, he would probably find the neatly ordered houses, with the massive, snow-covered mountains towering behind them, to be quite beautiful.

Right now, however, he could see nothing to recommend their new home to him. As the two young people watched, light snow began to drift down around them.

"I should think it's going to be cold here," Will said quietly.

He felt Evanlyn's chilled hand creep into his. He squeezed it gently, hoping to give her a sense of encouragement. A sense that was totally foreign to the way he himself was feeling at the moment.